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Quick Thoughts on NoSQL Live Boston Conference

I'm back home now from the Boston "NoSQL Live" conference organized by 10gen.com (the MongoDB folks). It was a good event. A lot of stuff covered, a broad range of topics. I have a fair amount to say, but need to digest, review notes, etc. In any case, thanks to 10gen and the various sponsors that made it happen.

Some quick, random thoughts:

Picking a good table at lunch is key: we ended up sitting with four different presenters, including Jonathan Ellis for Cassandra and Alex Feinberg for Voldemort, which happen to be two of the systems I'm personally most interested in using at the moment.

There is an undeniable latest-thing-fan(boy|girl)ism aura surrounding the "NoSQL" brand/meme/whatever, but the various presenters and leading lights in various projects appear to be reasonable and fact-based; don't let the breathless silliness of fans fool you.

I went in feeling convinced of the desirability of non-relational datastores for specific modeling situations (graphs) and for scalability/availability/volume concerns (Dynamo and BigTable derivatives), while feeling relatively skeptical of "document datastores". I left feeling basically the same way, though decidedly less skeptical of CouchDB than I previously was.

There is a lot of good thinking and discussion going on in the space, it's moving very fast, and the future looks bright.